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CHARACTERIZATION in the short story
IN a powerful story, with excellence of form there will be found blended excellence of characterization. It is, nevertheless, the restricted form of the Short- story which makes the task of characteri tion ...especially difficult. The means of drawing har¬acter in the novel and in the Short-story are essen¬tially the same. The only difference is that, while the novel is unrestricted, the Short-story requires _An intensive application of methods. While in the novel one may listen at leisure to a recital of the hero's characteristics and watch him develop through two or three hundred pages, in a multi¬plication of episodic incident and in crisis after crisis; in the Short-story one watches the main character in but a single full crisis and sees him .-portrayed in few pages, by a limited amount of incident and scant description. The Short-story must not devote time and space to non-essentials. Characterization should be of the swiftest. A few sketch-strokes must be made to do the duty of whole pages in a longer narrative. Yet the char¬acter must be definite, true, and lifelike. From the way a character meets the single crisis, one should be able to judge how he would act under other circumstances. His measure should be taken, so that one may know whether he is a great man capable of great things or a little man capable only of petty things. By what is said, much that is „left unsaid may be suggested. The essence, almost,•of i man's character should be indicated by means which seem perhaps no more than the habitual , expression of that character. Such finesse of char ,. acter drawing seems almost impossible; yet a hand has been so painted as instantly and unmistak ably to suggest the Person to whom it belongs. So, also, a Short-story may suggest a character in its entirety. A character is not simply a record of personal appearance and external peculiarities. It does not consist in a loud voice, an affected accent, a stiff manner, an unusual gesture, a modest glance, or a genteel appearance. All of these things indi¬tate character; they are the outward expressions of the real man, but they are not the real man. A pharacter represents a whole man. It consists of the sum of a man's habits, physical, mental, and spiritual. One wishes to know how a man thinks, what are his thoughts, how he acts, how he speaks, what are his prejudices, his joys, his fears, his hopes, his successes, his failures, his loves, his hates, his disappointments, his capabilities, his crowning ambi tions. Such things may be hidden to the casual observer. They make up a man's personality, — something too subtle for analysis. They may fail to be observed in one's best friend or to disclose themselves to oneself. Yet they are there for good or for evil, making one man into a murderer, another into a saint. Stress of emotion, or a sudden change of fortune, may reveal a trait which has been for years unsuspected. So many are the variations and shadings of personality that no one individual will appeal in the same way to two persons. At one time a person may seem even-tempered and gentle, at another, quick-tempered and stern. The char¬acterizer has, therefore, a difficult task. He must combine all that he feels a character to be into one suggestive whole. He must know a character so thoroughly that he will reveal not the man's external characteristics, but his personality. He must under¬stand human nature and reflect it with power and much sympathy. Although it is impossible for a writer to know any one individual perfectly, he may know the character he chooses to portray in a story. The writer may thus reconcile the warring elements of character, make the inconsistent seem consistent, and the imperfect seem perfect. The character which he makes will not be a portrait reproducing the exact lines of an actual individual; it may be a composite of the characteristics of many individuals, all bound together by one dominating trait. The actual facts may be culled by observation from life, but the character will be shaped by the broodings of imag¬ination. "The character created is not a thing of shreds and patches. It is a new conception." 1 No amount of observing and arbitrary piecing to¬gether will make a character worthy of the name. In its making there must enter a vast deal of imagina¬tive insight which will recreate and make a character actually live for a reader. Because a character is of human nature, it may live for one as no actual character may. It may be like no living ...-human being, yet like all human beings. "It is to be noticed, however, — and here, I suspect what Ruskin calls the mystery of the imagination enters, — that this process of abstraction, selection, combination, is mostly not a conscious one. The wholes, though they must doubtless be formed of elements gathered in our experience, seem to spring into existence spontaneously. The poet does not laboriously piece together out of his treasured experience the creatures of his imagination; they come to him The elements of which they are made seem to unite according to some laws of spontane¬ous combination not entirely under the control of the will." C. T. Winchester, Principles of Literary Criticism, Category:Character